Is it possible to be like Jesus? Can we be like God loving everyone and always showing kindness even to those who are ungrateful? Paul tells the Ephesians:
Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. (Ephesians 5:1 ESV)
And in keeping with our Advent Prayer “put on the armor of light”:
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires. (Romans 13:14 ESV)
Advent, this time of preparing for the second coming of Jesus, we need His heart to be our heart. God has a plan with a goal and a method so that we might be “good fruit,” that we might “rise to the life immortal.”
God’s goal for your life is to be like Him. God wants us to be students of Jesus. To be Jesus’ disciple is literally to be His student. Jesus taught His students about the Kingdom of Heaven, being under God’s rule and care. Jesus taught that God was directly available to each of His students.
The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry. (Psalm 34:15 ESV)
Living under God’s rule frees and empowers us to love as God loves. But when we don’t see and know God’s rule in our everyday life we may be too frightened or angry to love others as God does. To put it in a context we might understand Jesus’ words:
“What’s so great if you love those who love you? Terrorist do that! Suppose you are friendly to “your kind of people;” So is the Mafia! (an unattributed quote from D. Willard on Matthew 5.46-47)
So what is God’s plan to make my heart like His heart? In good Trinitarian style there are three things: endurance, strengthen, and activity.
Endurance
In our lives we have trials, trouble comes on us, and we have everyday problems. Endurance is facing those difficulties with the certainty that they are under God’s rule and in faith we live by the sufficiency of God’s love for us. Patience and trust are the substance of this endurance.
Strength
God intends us to “walk in the Spirit” and thereby interact with God. The Holy Spirit awaits our invitation to act upon us, with us, and for us. We have to ask the Spirit to exercise God’s rule, His Kingdom life, in our lives. We can recognize it by its bringing love, joy, and peace into our life. Outwardly, this Spirit life is seen in two ways in our lives.
You will see it in the gifts of the Spirit. The Spirit enables you to perform, to serve, to function for God’s purpose among His people. You are a member of the Body of Christ and God gives gifts to every person so they might intercede, lead, heal, and serve here in this Christian fellowship. What gifts has the Holy Spirit given you to help and serve our fellowship? In what ways are you being led to bring the praise and worship of God for your brothers and sisters in Christ? How you bring “the praise and worship of God” to them is going to be uniquely yours. What is notably at the center is Christ. The work of the Spirit is to make Christ known, to point to Jesus. I am to make the love of Christ known in your life. You are to make Christ known to me.
You will also see the fruit of the Spirit. Our lives are strengthened by the Spirit transforming our character.
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23 ESV)
It is the Holy Spirit who brings these qualities into our lives so that we might be strengthen to have our heart be like His heart. These gifts and fruits are the result of what the Holy Spirit is doing in your life—they are NOT the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who is present with us, draws us to behold the glory of God, and transforms us into the image and likeness of God.
Activity
This third part of God’s plan is not any activity, but the spiritual practice of “putting on the new man” (Colossians 3.9-10). These activities require our effort, but are dependent upon God’s grace to bring about a spiritual transformation in our lives.
Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony (Colossians 3:12-14 ESV)
Jesus did these activities like solitude, study, service, prayer, fasting, and worship. We “put on” this new person by these regular activities and using our effort.
Christian author on the spiritual life, Dallas Willard, noted that
The single most obvious trait of those who profess Christ but do not grow into Christ-likeness is their refusal to take the reasonable and time-tested measures for spiritual growth.
God’s plan for our having a heart like His requires all three: endurance, strength, and activity. This is a radical change that God has planned, to turn our hearts to Him and His Kingdom, with all our heart, soul, and mind.
My thanks for the ideas and content from C.S. Lewis, E. Underhill, D. Willard, R. Warren, and others.